


Lost

by Charona



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inner Dialogue, Joe centric, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Post-War, Repressed Memories, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unresolved Tension, it all started with a cloud and now look what happened, pondering, this is dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:41:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23529334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charona/pseuds/Charona
Summary: Joe Liebgott hadn’t thought about David Webster for years after the war. They lived very different lives and it was okay with Joe. On a late summer’s evening in September, though, Joe gets reminded of David by a formation of clouds, which look a lot like a whale – or was it a shark?Joe knows, it means nothing.What Joe doesn’t know, is that he wouldn’t be thinking of him for the last time this weekend – and realise what he’d lost.
Relationships: Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster
Comments: 14
Kudos: 27





	Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [3milesup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/3milesup/gifts).



> Okay, I’ve read so much in this fandom over the last years and never found the guts to publish something myself.  
> So here goes my first B.o.B. work and it is based on a tumblr post of the “sky whale” and the connection to David Webster.  
> This goes out to **3milesup** , because I love you. No kidding. I love you, you rule! and you even beta'd this, so THANK YOU! <3  
> This is my take on that scenario. Of course, everything is fictional and I mean no harm to these men or their families. 
> 
> Be prepared, this is dark.

Joe steered the car into the driveway, pulled the hand brake and turned off the ignition. The sudden silence filled his ears and the missing vibration underneath his feet made his neck tingle. He leant his head back against the head rest and closed his eyes.  
This had been his ritual for more than a decade now and Joe stuck to it like glue. These few minutes at dusk, the calm before entering the house filled with the laughter and mess of five children and his heavily pregnant wife’s ever-present care – they belong to him, these few minutes of silence, of _thinking_.  
He knew, some of his former comrades would snicker at the sheer possibility of Joseph Liebgott actually sitting in his car every weekday’s evening and just _thinking_. Moreover they’d be even surprised to hear, that there wasn’t even the good old _boos’n’smoke_ involved. Maybe it was the reason, why Joe enjoyed it so much. That it was his little haven of five minutes between long work hours full of babbling customers in the backseat of his cab or in the barber stool and the company of his family that gave him little chance to actually listen to his own thoughts. And Jesus, did he think a lot within that precious and narrow frame of time.

He turned his head to collect the last rays of the descending sun, before it would disappear behind the building opposite his own. It was a nice house, exactly one of those, he’d promised to Frances before the war had separated them and delayed their engagement.  
At the train station, she had told him with a soft and beautiful smile “A house, children, marriage – Ya made a lot of promises, Joseph D. Liebgott. Ya better come back to me and keep ‘em.”  
And he did.  
He came back, intact, alive, whole.  
Almost. 

It was in these darkening hours, that Joe could walk the line and throw a glance over the thin fence to that other side of him, which he left in Europe. The shattered and ghostly version of himself still roaming the battlegrounds in Normandy and the Ardennes, the one that sometimes knocked at his door in the middle of the night and hovered over his sleeping form. It made him jolt awake around four a.m. with the screams of dying friends ringing in his ears. Cooling sweat and prickling tears keeping him from falling back to sleep just as much as the images of explosions ripping gorging holes into frozen forest soil and shadow-like skeletons tearing at his uniform.  
Most of the time he made his way downstairs, drank a glass of water (there were times when something stronger auburn-colored filled the glass, but he quit the habit soon after his first-born son saw the light of day) and laid down on the living room couch.  
There were soundless nights and those, where Frances stirred next to him and he’d tell her in a husky voice to go back to sleep. His wife knew of his troubles, but she couldn’t find a way to address it with Joe himself. She talked to her friends about it, who pitied an army man’s wife’s troubles and consulted her over a brandy or a martini during their Friday afternoon’s skat game.  
She once mentioned the word “therapy” to Joe and it needed just one steely glance from his onyx eyes and she never brought it up again.  
These five minutes were better than any charlatan rummaging through his head and dealing country lore for a fortune.  
Maybe he was scared of what might be found inside that screwed little head of his, which was still crowned by that messy black mob of hair he took into war 15 years ago.  
The battles for once, of course, the ever-present possibility of death taking you by a firm grip and leading you to… wherever you believe she’d lead you to – or someplace entirely else.  
Some of it he confided to paper and sent across the country. Especially in George Luz Joe found a confident, he hadn’t thought he’d ever find in the witty man from Massachusetts. George got his rambling as well as his radio silence, sometimes stretching for months, before he had the guts to send another letter. 

He sighed and got out of the car. His time was almost up. His knees hurt from the day’s work and his neck was stiff, but the chilly air cooled his hot back muscles.  
He wished he could state that he gained weight since the war, but he still was skinny and ragged as he had been back in Toccoa and George wasn’t the only one busting his balls about it.  
Truth be told, Joe had gotten letters from everyone over the years: Christmas cards from Nixon Company signed by a certain Dick Winters and Babe had sent a postcard from New Orleans and a very entertaining picture of himself eating Gumbo for the first time (and apparently choking on the spicy stew as far as Joe could tell from the blurry black-and-white picture).  
Even Ronald Speirs had sent him a letter, inquiring about his wellbeing.  
There was only one he’d never received a single letter from, someone who – ironically – had been so keen on writing during their time in Europe.

He shook his head about himself and made his way to the front door, baby Judith’s gurgling already reaching his ears through the wind screen. 

It was one of those beautiful summer’s evenings, when autumn already hung in the air and sent a fresh breeze through the dry and dusty streets. But the sun still rose high and had enough power to keep the thoughts of falling leaves, scarfs and raincoats at bay. Just yesterday Joseph Jr. had gotten a mild sun burn while playing in the backyard with his younger sisters. 

Joe sighed and stared up into the almost cloudless sky, shades reaching from orange to blue in a breathtaking swirl of colors. _As if an artist had spilled of bucket of paint_ , he thought and smirked one of his most private smirks. It was one he reserved for moments like this, when he was alone with himself and his thoughts. 

He checked whether the garage was locked with a side glance and an image caught his eye, tickled his nerves. He lifted his gaze above the garage to the purple sky, staring right into the orbit, dotted with first stars, visible now in the fading daylight. What he saw, made him squint his eyes and then snort. He knew, he should get inside. By now, Frances must have seen the car in the drive way and probably scold him for loiter about without a reason, but he was transfixed by the spectacle and at the same time inexplicably annoyed.  
Instead, he walked a few steps back onto the lawn and shook his head at the formation of clouds hovering just above a higher building somewhere in Downtown Frisco.  
“Finally found the guts to show up here, huh?” he asked in a sarcastic huff and stared up at a whale made of clouds swimming through the sky, as if it were the deepest ocean. The grey and white clouds really looked like a giant fish and of course it made Joe think of him, who else could be his first association with a sea animal? 

The thing was (he recalled and kept staring at the bright blue sky with wide eyes) –

David Kenyon Webster had become a faint shadow to Joseph D. Liebgott after the war.  
They lived very different lives on opposite sides of the continent. 

Until one night their worlds collided again in the form of Joe’s house telephone ringing in the middle of the night during the summer of 1948.  
He’d jumped out of bed in an instant, since a mandatory nightmare had woken him up half an hour earlier.  
He muttered a soft “Go back to sleep” to Frances, who stirred slightly, and it would have been their usual nocturnal exchange of words if it weren’t for Joe hasting towards the phone in the hallway, before it could wake up the children.  
He expected a prank, someone misdialing or some stupid advertising agency lacking decency as much as common sense (Frances had started to order stuff from the radio adverts and it drove Joe insane).  
What he didn’t expect was the drunken slur of a voice all too familiar and still distant through the crackling of the long distance phone line. 

“Do you remember Landsberg?” Was the reception, which wasn’t one, really, and Joe leaned his head against the cool door frame. “Joe, do you remember Landsberg? Were you at Landsberg?”  
“You know, I was.”  
They mirrored their exchange from Berchtesgaden, light years away as it appeared to Joe now leaning against the wall in his hallway barefooted and the ever present Californian heat sticking to his pajamas, being on the phone with David Webster of all people.  
“It was horrible, wasn’t it?”  
Joe didn’t know if David was looking for reassurance or comfort or someone who told him to quit drinking and go to bed. So he stayed silent and listened to him breathe and think.  
The silence stretched and Joe heard the clock in the kitchen tick away the night. 

“I just remembered it, you know? I woke up and I thought about you and what we’ve seen and that no one will ever come close to understanding the turmoil coming back to civilization threw us into.”  
_Of course he could never be drunk enough to not use the word turmoil_ , Joe thought and ignored the goosebumps spreading on his neck and forearms. _But, fuck me, I was thinking about Landsberg myself just minutes ago…_  
“Maybe not…” was his weak attempt of an answer. Defensiveness tried to keep him on his guard. “Why are you telling me this?”  
It should have sounded a bit more aggressive and provoking, a clear sign for David to hang up the phone and sleep it off (whatever _it_ was in the end, a mixture of drunkenness and haunting memories maybe?).  
He didn’t expect David’s voice to break. He imagined him sitting in his neatly arranged study at his parents’ villa, a bottle of expensive liquor on his perfectly ordered university papers leaving dark rings of shame on the white sheets come morning and hangover.  
Little did he know, that David was sat at the bulk trash kitchen table in his shabby and cold student’s apartment, the wall of the neighboring building so close to his own, he could smell the reek of cat piss every time he opened his only window. He was unshaven and hollow and the bottle was a cheap swill of something similarly disgusting.  
There was no answer and Joe fumbled with a loose splinter in the wooden sideboard next to the phone.  
“Why are you calling, Web?”  
It felt strange, using that name and it had nothing to do with the late hours and the silent hallway. David’s breath hitched and it sounded like a sob. Joe leaned his head against the wall again and just waited for the wave to wash his former companion clean of the pain.  
It did eventually and Joe felt strangely cleansed, too, when he realized he smiled weakly.  
“It’s okay. I know.”  
“I know, you do. I knew, you would.” 

There was no uttered gratitude, no apology and maybe just a hint of shame, but it did become a mandatory thing. Not as mandatory as the letters from other comrades, not even the ones from Speirs, but they did call each other whenever the mood struck or something significant happened.  
Sometimes they just remained silent for half an hour, sometimes they chatted about everything and nothing at all. Their relationship was just like the tide and Joe had rolled his eyes, when David told him that. “Give me a break, college boy.” he’d said, but a wide grin had split his lips.  
They were friends, in the loosest sense of the word.  
Sometimes Joe caught himself wondering why they did this and how questionable their morals were, but every time he followed the urge to tell David about his life. Sometimes they snapped at each other, more than often David would laugh at his simplicity and misunderstanding of words. And still, every few months for the last ten years they’d sat down on their respective house telephones and spent an afternoon talking. 

David called Joe to announce his engagement with a classy and sweet Uptown girl in 1952 and Joe had joked that David better didn’t forget about his snarky little Downtown friend. David had laughed him off. 

It came as no surprise that Joe didn’t congratulate him.  
It came as no surprise that David didn’t invite him to the wedding. 

Joe called David, when his daughter Janet was born and David joked “Ey, are you going to end your family plans before you run out of names with a J or should I send you a dictionary for baby names?” Joe had cursed and laughed under his breath.  
One day, and this memory floats into Joe’s mind just like the animal was floating across the evening sky, he called David to tell him about the whale his oldest daughter had drawn with blue and green crayons. David wanted to know, what it looked like and Joe smiled at the memory of their banter.  
“Well, it’s a fish, rather big, blue, flippers and all.”  
“A whale is not a- never mind… and fins is the better term. What does the tail fin look like? Perpendicular or parallel to the ground?”  
“Jesus Christ, Web, it’s a kid’s drawin’! How the fuck am I supposed to-“  
“Just answer the question, Lieb.”  
“Ahm… the first word, I think.”  
“Then it’s a shark.”  
“How would you know?”  
“Please tell me, you know the difference between a shark and a whale?”  
He _heard_ David’s eyes pop out of his head through the line.  
“One’s bigger, ay?”  
“Wow... and someone like you is allowed to procreate?!”  
“To what?! Jesus, Web, speak English…”  
A few minutes passed before David had stopped laughing enough to find his voice again.  
“Cool, so your daughter drew you a shark. You sure it wasn’t a portrait of you?”  
Joe had frowned and looked at the phone in his hand for a second.  
“Why me?”  
“Because you kind of look like a shark sometimes. At least you looked like it back in the day.”  
Joe swallowed and fumbled with his coffee mug. A million thoughts swirled through his mind, a million questions.  
_Is that why you are obsessed with sharks lately? Do you want to know, what I look like? Do you think about what I might look like now? Are you thinking of me?_  
“You always fancied me.”  
David huffed and what should have sounded like a laugh sounded hollow and mechanical through the line.  
“Yeah…” 

The only thing, they didn’t do was meet.  
The other thing and the reason, which kept him from attending one of the numerous reunions was just as blue as the sky above his head right in this very moment, where the giant fish drew a wide line across the horizon.  
_Scared of the color blue, what a bullshit…_  
He fumbled for his cigarettes in his jacket and lit one. He knew, he should go inside. By now, Frances must have seen the car in the drive way and she’d probably scold him for loiter about without a reason.  
He wasn’t scared of the color per se, of course, he wasn’t a child scared of the color black just because the night brought so many unsettling noises and to be frank, he’d seen more terrors than most people could imagine.  
He was scared of a particular pair of blue eyes and the risk of drowning in them – or alternately doing something entirely stupid. 

_The next time, I’ll go to one of those damn reunions and tell him about the whale in the sky_ , he decided as he turned around and unlocked the front door, just to be hit by a full-force hug of his two oldest daughters and their delighted cheering.

Little did he know at that time that he would never get the chance to meet David again – he would soon find out, though. 

At night, he tossed and turned in his sleep as if his bed was a sinking ship, a toy to monstrous waves and the destructive storm. And even then, in the midst of a raging hurricane out at sea, with the thundering clashing of water and howling wind, he heard a soft whisper. Someone called his name. Someone said “Lieb!” in ways that would fit a loving whiff rather than a scream for help. It was just that syllable, lost at sea, just like-  
He woke up with a soft gasp, nothing more but a sharp intake of breath and wide, dark eyes staring into the darkness of his bedroom. Frances next to him was sound asleep and Joe wiped his cheeks. He expected rain water and droplets of sea spray covering his face – and in fact his skin was wet. Salty tears ran down his cheeks and Joe cleaned them off with the sleeve of his pajamas like a crying child would do, stubbornly decisive and yet in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be able to stop more tears from falling.  
Joe felt weird.  
He couldn’t pin-point the origin. Normally his dreams were exact recollections of things he experienced, leading Tipper out of that house in Carentan, stopping Hale from bleeding to death after a German prisoner slit his throat, translating the doctor’s orders in Landsberg.  
This dream was different, because he’d never felt so powerless before.

He got up and roamed the house until dawn. There was no way he could go back to sleep now.  
He walked up and down the living room and kept throwing an uneasy glance at the phone again and again.  
Some part of him expected it to ring and David Webster’s tired and drunk voice to fill the dark room in the middle of the night – just like it had done over ten years ago.  
Joe flopped down on the sofa and ruffled his hair.  
“Stop acting crazy…” he muttered to himself and started bobbing his knee.  
He lit a cigarette and wiped his forehead with his free thumb.  
But he wasn’t acting crazy, not any crazier than usual, because _I could have sworn I heard Web’s voice call my name_.  
His heart skipped a beat and he accidentally dropped ash onto the thick carpet.  
“So you finally found a curse to haunt me in one of your fancy books, eh?” he murmured and the tip of his cigarette gleamed bright orange like a buoy in the middle of his living room.  
He should go back to bed in order to get some sleep. He had plans for tomorrow and he _was_ tired to the bone. But the thought of going back to sleep appeared absurd, so he stayed put on the sofa and listened to the clock in the kitchen. 

His thoughts roamed freely through the living room and still landed on the same topic again and again. His smoking got more frantic, when he realized that he hadn’t thought about Webster in months and suddenly he seemed to be haunted by the guy.  
Again his eyes wandered to the phone, onyx black piercing into green plastic.  
Unwillingly he thought about _that_ phone call over three years ago.  
What had started as their usual talk about their everyday lives, work and wives and children, had somehow dwindled into a conversation Joe had never expected to have with _anyone_ , least of all with David fucking Webster.  
They suddenly talked about life and dreams and the future and everything Joe was incredibly uncomfortable with.  
“Come on, Joe.” David had pressed at some point. “There must be something you want from this life other than…”  
“What? Paying my bills, loving my family and growing old with my wife?” Joe had snarled and clenched his fist. “Why? Isn’t that good enough for you, college boy?”  
“I wish I was that simple. I mean, I wish it was…” Fumbling for words and apparently a drink, because Joe heard the chinking of glass. “enough. I wish, I could just live my life like that and be happy.”  
That was a rather simple term considering David’s repertoire of words.  
He waited for a moment and then made a tentative move.  
“What’s going on?”  
“I’m just not happy right now, Lieb. I don’t know. I feel stuck somehow, I miss…” _What?_ “Just. Life. I guess. Simple, little things. A connection with someone, maybe. Something that matters with someone who matters to me.”  
Joe blinked and listened cautiously, but David was done talking and resumed to drinking. A part of Joe wanted to snap “You’re married, for fuck’s sake, talk to your wife about this stuff”, but he didn’t. Something in David’s voice held him back. That and the fact that he was day drinking on a Holiday.  
“Why are you telling me this?” He asked and it felt like they were back in 1948 and it was the middle of the night instead of broad daylight. _What am I doing with this information? What does this have to do with me?_ This time, though, Joe did get an answer.  
“Because I want you to know.”

Silence. Then David downright _giggled_ , maybe on the drunker side of tipsy, and Joe snorted.  
“Man, you need a hobby! Start with those fishes of yours, that’ll keep you busy for another decade or something.”

Joe grinned at the memory and stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray.  
“Time to lay you to rest, Web. Just like Berchtesgaden, right?”  
When they had been drinking like sponges for days on end and fell asleep on top of each other multiple times. One time Joe woke up on a bench at a town hall square to the sound of David retching into a flower tub. He’d never laughed harder at anything so early in the morning before or ever since.  
Joe grabbed a blanket from the armrest and laid down on the sofa to get a couple hours of sleep before dawn. 

The following Sunday, Joe decided to spend as much time as possible outside to stretch his legs and play with the children.

What he ended up doing was clean his car.  
“These city bastards just can’t keep their shit out of my baby!”  
He’ll never admit of having said that, but he truly valued his Impala, it was a solid car. A little worn down and battered, but it belonged to him and that made it special in his eyes. He dreaded the day of having to replace it with a newer model.  
He picked up a lost or forgotten glove and threw it onto the lawn, giving in to the comment “Jesus, at Bastogne I would have killed one of the guys for one of these”. He tried to keep it in mind in order to write it down and send it to Luz next week, when he felt a newspaper being stuck underneath the front seat. 

He growled, pulled at the paper and finally managed to get it out of there. He remembered the customer, a rich guy, he picked up from JFK the other day. He was noisy and posh and talked in an accent not unlike David’s. It was one of those times Joe was happy to play the veteran card and get him to shut up with a well-rehearsed speech about how he marched through Europe so office sitters like him could have their expensive suits and briefcases. It cost him his tip, but it was better than listening to that idiot. 

Now he had to clean up this idiot’s mess and he would have discarded the paper without a second glance, if not a certain name had caught his attention. 

And so it happened, that Joseph Liebgott stumbled upon David Webster for the third time in less than 24 hours.  
He expected to read his name underneath one of the smaller articles, some political stuff or a fancy commentary maybe or even underneath the major head-article filling the front page. What he hadn’t expected was reading David Webster’s name in the headline and especially not in the sentence that turned Joe’s stomach upside down. The tiny black spots, the printer press had stitched into the grey paper to form words felt like needles pricking at his skin, making his eyes water. 

**“Oceanographer and war hero David K. Webster lost at sea and presumed dead.”**

Joe’s first audible reaction was a soft huff and the crunching of paper, as he lowered it to his chest, as if to press the knowledge into his heart without having to read the news.  
The next reaction was a louder one, which reverberated over the dusty pavement, the driveway and the lawn in high need of a trim.  
“Bullshit!” he exclaimed and it echoed back to him through the dead-end-street. A window fell shut somewhere in the corner building.  
Joe didn’t allow himself to blink, to let any distraction near him, but unfolded the newspaper and started reading. The words entered and left his mind in a swirl of black and grey, there was no meaning behind them whatsoever. It was a rather short message, the page was dominated by two pictures of David Kenyon “Web” Webster. A picture taken in Berchtesgaden, before they made their way up to the “Eagles nest”. It showed Web sitting crossed legged by a truck, his back leaning against the front tire, obligatory note book in his lap, squinting against the sun.  
Another look would have revealed Joe’s own shoulder and boots right next to him at the left corner of the picture. They’d spent the day fighting about whether graphic novels were novels or not and took a swim in one of the numerous Alpine lakes to let the crystal clear and icy water cool off their heated bodies and tempers.  
But Joe didn’t pay attention to the right picture, he looked at the left, a more recent photograph of David holding up a book with the title _Myth and Maneater: The story of the shark_.  
And before any realization could seep through his system, before the words “Santa Monica”, “shark research”, “presumed dead” entered his organism, Joe shook his head in the childlike attempt to blind himself from the fact, that David Webster had gone shark fishing off the coast of Santa Monica, got into a storm and drowned.  
He was dead.  
He was dead and Joe blinked at the pavement of his driveway and _he_ was still breathing. 

The worst thing was neither the silence, interrupted only by a couple of children happily playing on the neighbors’ lawn, nor the wild thumping of his heart. There was no biblical cloud covering the sparkling blue sky above his head, nor did he get struck by a lightning.  
The worst thing was, that _nothing_ happened. The children kept laughing, somewhere a dog barked frantically, the old Miller from across the street started to mow his lawn.  
Nothing changed and yet everything was different. For Joe. 

It was when the indifference of the world to the decease of a middle aged veteran set in – leading to nothing but housewives using his obituary to wrap in flowers or as a underlayment for paintwork —, that the dirty cloth in Joe’s hand fell to the floor and the words sank in with a soft and almost hydraulic _click_.

The sky shark.  
The dream.  
Web’s voice.  
The article. 

Joe’s vision blurred and he sank down onto the dark blue tool box next to the front tire. He pressed a fist against his mouth, smearing his cheek with polisher in the process and not finding the energy to care.  
The tears didn’t come at first, they wouldn’t for another day, until he’d break down during his lunch break on the pier. He’d cry and sob and punch the steering wheel and scream (“Why didn’t you just tell me?! Why didn’t you just swing by?! You were in California, you bastard! You could have seen me and wouldn’t have had to get lost on sea on the search for a fake one! Why did you leave me?!”) until his voice would be reduced to a shaky whimper.  
It’d be the last time in his life Joseph would cry a single tear. 

Oh, Joseph Liebgott would mourn David Webster in his own way and to his own terms. 

Every other week Joe would call his office in New York. He’d sit alone at the kitchen table with a cigarette dangling from his lips and cradling the phone receiver in his hand, pressing the earpiece as close to his ear as possible, as if to drown out every other noise and keep the voice on the other end of the line all to himself.  
He listened to the beeping, then the soft click and then the warmth of a soft New York accent seeped through the cable and into Joe’s system. Like every time before he had to keep himself from sobbing and the cigarette smoke got stuck in his throat. He wiped at his eyebrow with trembling fingers and ash fell from the tip of his cigarette onto the wooden kitchen table. He didn’t have the energy to sweep it away.  
All Joseph Liebgott did in these moments before dawn, when the whole house was still fast asleep and not even birds announced a new day, was listen to David Webster’s voice mail. 

“Hello, you have reached David Webster’s desk at the _Wall Street Journal_. Unfortunately I can’t answer the phone myself at this moment. Please try again later or leave a message and your phone number after the tone and I’ll get back to you. In case of important suggestions regarding next week’s issue please make sure to arrange an appointment with my secretary Patricia. Thank you very much.”

Joseph hung up the phone, lit a new cigarette since his old one went out without him realizing and dealt the same number again, as if he expected a different result.  
Again beeping and then David’s warm voice, repeating the sentences Joseph could recite like a prayer or his favorite song.  
He lowered his head to his arm, the phone firmly clutched to his ear and let a heavy sob shake his upper body, while the cigarette smoldered away in between the cold fingers of his outstretched hand.  
He didn’t really know, why he was doing this, why he missed David so much.  
All he knew is that he did and that he wanted David to pick up the phone just before the message ended and greet him with a slightly out of breath “Hi, yeah, this is David Webster, what can I do for you?” and he wanted to yell at him for setting out on his boat that day years ago and for not shooting that Nazi commandant and for missing out Bastogne and for returning all tidy and neat and for getting shot in the leg in the first place and for staying in New York just to come to Santa Monica for his fucking shark research and for that in particular stupid hobby. 

But most of all Joseph wanted to scream at David for dying.  
He wanted to shake him and punch him and yell at him and then sink against his chest and be held.  
Maybe then he’d have the courage to actually kiss him without bothering about the outcome – a snarky comment, a shove or the beginning of the best time of his life. 

The closest Joe got to any of that was listen to a dead man’s voice mail and cry at the dead of night.  
He pitied himself. He hated himself. He was afraid.  
He dreaded the day his calls wouldn’t even be answered by the recording anymore and all Joe would be left alone with was the nagging feeling of not having had enough courage to _try_. 

They never had the closure they deserved and craved for, dared to ask the question “Why?” and never gave in to the “What if”.  
They never had the life they secretly wanted and all that time Joe was okay with it. He didn’t question it, he kept his promises. 

He’ll never know, that David had marveled at the formation of clouds mere miles away from him down the Californian coastline as he’d reached for the cable to make his way back to the port.  
He’ll never know, that David did whisper his name, when the storm raged around him and waves tore his boat apart and pulled him underwater. 

As well as David will never know how many times Joe genuinely wanted to call him.  
He’ll never know how often he’d bit his lip bloody to keep himself from saying something risky.  
He’ll never know of his pain.  
He’ll never know, how hollow he’d left him. 

They’ll never know, what they’d lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, feel free to share your opinion :)
> 
> Read you soon,  
> Charona


End file.
